Our Mission

The Mission of the Institute is to provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write in order to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to national defense.

While America was preoccupied with the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, an even greater tragedy was unfolding across Southeast Asia. From Wake Island to Burma, the Empire of Japan opened the largest front in the history of warfare: an aircraft-driven invasion of colonial possessions throughout the Far East that crumbled the entire Western imperial legacy of the nineteenth-century. Events during the first two weeks of battle set the stage for the greatest military defeats America and Great Britain would suffer during any conflict. This book offers the first comprehensive overview of the collapse of Allied air forces during the period between December 8 and 24, 1941. Written for a wide audience, it gives readers both a cockpit view of the desperate actions that took place and an understanding of why such heavy losses occurred. The narrative account includes enough detail and analysis to hold the interest of serious students of Pacific War aviation and enough exciting descriptions of air combat to attract those with little knowledge of the subject.

Explaining how and why the Japanese were able to win a quick victory, John Burton points to U.S. failures in the concepts for employment of airpower and a significant underestimation of Japanese "air-mindedness" and aviation capabilities, failures that resulted in the loss or surrender of more than 200,000 troops at Bataan and Singapore.

John Burton, a former naval systems engineer and sales and operations executive at IBM for twenty years, has spent much of his life studying the aviation industry and aviation history. Now a marketing and business strategy consultant, he lives and writes in Irvine, California.

'Perhaps the best lesson to be learned from this book is the reminder that we need to be ready to defend our nation at all times, and to believe foreign leaders who say they wish to destroy us. Whether or not the leaders of foreign nations are bluffing, we need to be ready to defend ourselves should they attack. This book is an excellent piece of scholarship with a very readable style, and will be a valuable resource for those who cannot get enough of the study of the Pearl Harbor debacle and its aftermath."